Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  Tucked away and somehow forgotten in Rudyard Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book is one of Kipling’s best short stories that does not involve Mowgli and is animal friends. And yet, in many ways, “The Undertakers” is quintessential Kipling. The bulk of the story involves a conversation between three residents of India’s Wainganga River (said in the Mowgli stories to be the home of Shere Khan)at the time the British were building a railway bridge over its waters, a golden jackal, a stork and a mugger crocodile. Their conversations will be familiar to readers of the best remembered Jungle Book stories, hierarchies within the animal kingdom (the jackal appreciates the crocodile so long as he leaves enough of his kill to scavenge on) to the relationship between man and nature and what the coming of the railway means to life in the Wainganga. All this with the common thread of order and rank and the space each player plays in the established hierarchy, be it human, animal or both. F...